Montreal Tech Watch

Hightlights from DemoCampMontreal1:

• Evan Prodromou, the founder of wiki travel, demonstrated how to use Open ID. He had some DNS problems. I have yet to see a convincing presentation of OpenID. I understand its benefits, but I think someones needs to find a better pitch
• growwwing is an upcoming web service for freelancers and small businesses. Thierry Poitras, from ibop, said he wanted to make it so easy that your aunt could use it to create their own website. There is a lot of AJAX, Ruby on Rails with REST, APIs … The team works with Guillaume Thoreau, an user interface specialist. They want to finish soon, although the marketing tools are yet to be developed
• Alden Woodward and Kingsley Woodward demonstrated Darwin, a tool that adapts to the changing needs and processes of businesses, while Raj Vadavia presented Evolution. Evolution is a database technology which lets DBAs add dynamically objects and requests. Both technologies were very interesting although I wish they thought about a presentation made for DemoCamp.
• Marc Chriqui presented ilovetoplay, a social networking website for sports guys and girls who wants to organize a team or just play a casual game. ilovetoplay.com was launched one month ago, it has an extensive search function and has an elaborate profile manager.

I talked to Tom Sweeney, a partner from Garage Canada, and he thought that the presentations should be more interactive and engage the audience. We both agreed though that the Montreal tech scene is getting more dynamic and that it would be very interesting in the next few months.